The changing role of students’ unions within contemporary higher education

Abstract

Despite profound changes to the higher education sector in the UK over recent years, which have tended to emphasise the role of prospective students as active choosers within a marketplace and encourage higher education institutions (HEIs) to place more emphasis on student engagement and representation as a means of improving the quality of the learning experience, the role of students’ unions has remained largely unexplored. To start to redress this gap, this paper draws on a UK-wide survey of students’ union officers and a series of focus groups with 86 students and higher education staff in 10 case study institutions. It outlines the ways in which students’ unions are believed, by those closely involved with them, to have changed over recent years, focusing on: the shift towards a much greater emphasis on representation in the role and function of the students’ union; the increasing importance of non-elected officers; and the emergence of more cooperative relationships between the students’ union and senior institutional management. The article then discusses the implications of these findings for both our understanding of the political engagement of students, and theorising student involvement in the governance of HEIs.

Keywords:

• students’ union
• higher education
• political participation
• representation

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the National Union of Students and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education for funding this research. However, the views expressed in this article are the authors’ own. We would also like to express our thanks to all those who took part in the research – through completing the survey and/or participating in a focus group.

Notes

1. The Russell Group is comprised of 24 ‘research intensive’ HEIs, which typically occupy high positions in national league tables.

2. In addition, there were no obvious differences by HEI ‘type’ in the extent to which respondents reported a managerial ethos.

3. When we report data from the quantitative part of the project, we provide percentages or actual numbers. However, as the qualitative elements of the research aimed to explore specific themes in some depth, rather than document exactly how many people held particular views, we believe that giving precise numbers of respondents may give a misleading view about the nature of the data and the claims we wish to make. This is particularly important with respect to the focus groups, when we collected data at the level of the group, rather than the individual. As a result, we have used phrases such as ‘a majority of respondents’ and ‘a small number of focus group participants’ when reporting qualitative data.

4. Since 2005, the National Student Survey (a survey that all final year undergraduates across the UK are asked to complete) has asked students about the extent to which they agree that ‘I am satisfied with the Students’ Union at my institution’.